Eve McDonald-Madden

PhD conferred 2009

Since completing her PhD in 2008, Eve has held a post-doctoral research position in the Applied Environmental Decision Analysis Centre at the University of Queensland. She took up a new post-doctoral position in September 2009 with CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Brisbane. She is continuing her work in optimal management and monitoring of biodiversity and environmental threats (including pests). In particular, Eve will be undertaking a project looking at assisted migration as a management tool under climate change.

PhD project: Optimal decision-making in conservation: management, monitoring and evaluation

The aim of my project was to devise tools for detecting change in pest animal populations and the threatened species being protected, reliably and cost effectively, and placing monitoring within a robust management framework. Based on existing datasets on overabundant species I aim to develop new theory and mathematical methods to incorporate optimal monitoring scenarios and economic information into a decision theory approach for the management of pest species in Australia.

This idea of integrating monitoring into a decision theory approach for management is a relatively new innovation in conservation management (see Field et al. 2004), and therefore provides a unique opportunity for the application of this work to both the management of pests in other countries, for example New Zealand, and utilisation for other management scenarios.

Publications

Game, E., Bode, M., McDonald-Madden, E., Grantham, H.S., Possingham, H.P. (2009) Dynamic marine protected areas can improve the resilience of coral reefs. Ecology Letters 12, 1-11.
McDonald-Madden, E., Gordon, A., Wintle, B., Grantham, H., Walker, S., Carvalho, S., Bottrill, M., Joseph, M., Ponce, R., Stewart, R., Possingham, H.P. (2009) ‘True’ conservation progress. Science 323, 43-44.
McDonald-Madden, E., Baxter, P.W.J., Possingham, H.P. (2008) Making robust decisions for conservation with restricted money and knowledge. Journal of Applied Ecology 45, 1360-1638.
McDonald-Madden, E., Bode, M., Game, E.T., Grantham, H., Possingham, H.P. (2008) The need for speed: informed land acquisitions for conservation in a dynamic property market. Ecology Letters 11, 1169-1177.
McDonald-Madden, E., Baxter, P.W.J., Possingham, H.P. (2008) Subpopulation triage: How to allocate conservation effort among populations. Conservation Biology 22, 656-665.
Chadès, I., McDonald-Madden, E., McCarthy, M. A., Wintle, B., Linkie, M., and Possingham, H. P. (2008) When to stop managing or surveying cryptic threatened species. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences 105, 13936-13940.
Game E.T., McDonald-Madden, E., Puotinen, M. L., and Possingham, H. P. (2008) Should we protect the weak or the strong? Risk, resilience and the selection of marine protected areas. Conservation Biology 22, 1619-1629.
Bottrill, M., L. N. Joseph, J. Carwardine, M. Bode, C. Cook, E. T. Game, H. Grantham, S. Kark, S. Linke, E. McDonald-Madden, R. L. Pressey, S. Walker, K. A. Wilson, and H. P. Possingham (2008) Is conservation triage just smart decision-making? Trends in Ecology & Evolution 23, 649-654.
McDonald-Madden, E., Baxter, P.W.J., Possingham, H.P. (2008) Subpopulation triage: How to allocate conservation effort among populations. Conservation Biology 22, 656-665.